The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Closure of Camperdown Works ended ‘Juteopolis’
The closure of Camperdown Works 40 years ago was the death knell for Dundee’s “Juteopolis” empire.
Fo r 130 years the Camperdown complex, at one time sprawling over more than 25 acres, was the industrial giant of the suburb.
Countless thousands of Lochee folk spun there, sons and daughters following parents, generation after generation.
When the jute trade was busy, Lochee prospered.
In its heyday, the city was the world centre for the manufacture of the fabric, with around 50,000 people dependant on the industry for their livelihoods.
The impact of the jute industry ultimately attracted more people to Lochee, including workers from Irish linen and yarnproducing counties.
By 1900, Camperdown Works employed more than 5,000 people and was one of B r i t a i n’s greatest industrial complexes.
The 282-ft Cox’s Stack was the landmark for what became the largest jute works in the world.
The Cox family built it to ensure smoke from the furnaces was carried well above the nearby workers’ houses.
The red and white brick chimney was built in 1866 and reputedly contained a million bricks.
Camperdown was so big it had its own branch line and railway station.
The industry was hit by a series of booms and slumps in the 19th Century, before falling into decline in the 20th Century.
In 1920, Cox Brothers was one of several Dundee firms which came together to form Jute Industries (which later became Sidlaw Industries), under the chairmanship of James Ernest Cox, with Camperdown remaining one of its key works.
By 1950, there were only 39 jute firms left out of a total of 150 at the industry’s peak, with polypropylene being widely used as the backing for carpets at the expense of jute.
But Camperdown weathered all the storms until markets slumped to an all-time low.
The announcement by Sidlaw Industries was made in January 1981 that Camperdown Works would be closing.
The 340 jobs that went would bring to close on 2,000 the redundancy total for jute, polypropylene and carpets in Dundee since the start of the 1980s.
The jute industr y of Tayside shrunk to seven firms with a workforce likely numbering fewer than 3,000.
Sidlaw Industries were left after the Camperdown closure with 650 textile employees and only two jute mills – at Manhattan in Dundee and Selbie in Gourdon.
The directors were hopeful that the closure would ensure the remainder of their jute operations would become viable after they had been running at a heavy loss.
Local historian Dr Ke n n e t h B a x t e r, from Dundee University, said: “Al t h o u g h by 1981 its workforce was a fraction of what it had been at the start of the 20th Century, Camperdown Works was still employing a workforce of 340 people when it was announced that Sidlaw Industries were ending their textile operations at the site.
“Aside from the obvious financial implications for those who would lose their jobs and local businesses which had benefited from the custom of mill workers, the closure was of huge symbolic importance for Lochee and for Dundee as a whole.
“Camperdown Works was inextricably linked to the growth and history of Lochee for over a century and a quarter.
“Although it was not quite the end of the jute industry in Dundee,
Camperdown Wo r k s ’ closure cannot be seen as anything other than a blow to the city.
“Camperdown Works, and its famed Cox’s Stack, can be seen as the ultimate physical symbols of Victorian D u n d e e’s industrial might.
“The end of this iconic works showed beyond question that the era of Dundee as a great centre of the textile industry was well and truly over.”
Dundee- bred Edward Cox inherited Cox Brothers, the family firm, after his father died in 1885. He died from pneumonia aged 64 in 1913 at his Cardean estate in Meigle, Perthshire, with a £700,000 fortune, worth about £62 million in today’s money.
Following closure of the works in 1981, some parts of the complex were sold for demolition in 1985.
Much of the industrial heritage made way for the Stack Leisure Park which opened in 1993, but Cox’s Stack was retained as a landmark feature.
The end for Dundee’s jute industry finally came when the freighter Banglar Urmi arrived in October 1998. The 310 tonnes of raw jute on board represented the last consignment to be spun at the last mill, the Tay Spinners premises on Arbroath Road.